Smokeless tobacco is tobacco or a tobacco product that is used by means other than smoking. These uses include chewing, sniffing, placing the product between the teeth and gum, or application to the skin.
Smokeless tobacco products are recently gaining popularity and they are available in a variety of ways including dipping tobacco, chewing tobacco, snuff or snus.
Snus is a moist powder tobacco product sold in different ways including loose snus and portion snus. Loose snus is a moist powder which can be portioned and packed into a cylindrical or spherical shape with the fingertips or a purpose-made cylindrical device. Portion snus is prepackaged moist powder in small teabag-like pouch.
The manufacture of smokeless tobacco compositions like snus is done using a batch process including a heating step wherein the tobacco material is heated to a temperature of 80° C. or more. Each batch cannot be completed until it has cooled enough for addition of further additives. The cooling takes about 8 hours to cool the tobacco material from a temperature of 70° C. or more down to a temperature about 25° C. This leads to bottlenecks in the production process.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an improved method for preparing tobacco compositions avoiding these bottlenecks.